Welcome to my One Planner to Rule Them all mini-series! I’ll be going over the two planners that I will be receiving, and giving the pros and cons of each, as well as a comparison of both.

After a few weeks of waiting, I finally received my Plum Paper Family Planner! My experience with the company has been great. Communication has been awesome — every question I’ve sent in has been answered in a timely manner (within about a day). My planner also even shipped at the lower end of the time frame given! You can’t really beat that.

It’s very obvious that this company cares about their customers, and making them happy. Some people in the planner groups I’ve seen have mentioned a few little issues here and there.. Colors off on their customized covers, or they wanted to add in another insert, or switch around their order. Plum Paper has been very accommodating from what folks have been reported, making their mistakes right, sending corrections out to people really fast, etc.

As you can see here, the planner came very well packaged. It was wrapped in a generous amount of bubble wrap, and inside of a sturdy box. It arrived without any kinds of damage, no dings, or scratches or anything like that.

Plum Paper has a variety of covers for you to choose from, and you can even customize some aspects — whether or not you want a monogram, what name, quote, etc, you want on it, if you want a photo on it, and even what colors you’d like. I went with owls, as you can see, but it was a hard choice! There’s a lot of fun things to pick from!

The cover itself is made out of a decent card stock, with a frosted plastic over that. Some people choose to laminate their cardstock cover, and remove the frosted one. That, however, involves uncoiling the planner, taking off the cover, taking it to get laminated, and then recoiling it all. That terrifies me, so no thanks!

The first page of the planner is a place to jot down your contact info in the event you should lose your book. But seriously, who is going to let that kind of a thing happen?! The paper used for the pages is just epic. It’s nice and smooth, silky to the touch. I just kind of want to sit and pet it….

After that, you have a year at a glance, followed by next year at a glance. The back of the last page of these is blank.

After this you have your first month’s divider. Since I was getting my planner right before the start of March, that was when I decided to have mine begin. With Plum Paper, you can pick your starting month, and even add on extra months! These month dividers are nice cardstock as well, they don’t feel as heavy as the cover, but they’re still great. The tabs have lamination over them for protection. The backside of the divider is blank. Some people like to use this space to decorate, or plug in some sticky notes to use later, etc.

Right after the tab, you get a page for your notes. There’s also one of these pages at the end of the month as well.

And now we’re starting to get into the good stuff…. After your notes page, you get your monthly spread! I’ve seen most people use these, and I’ll be using mine to note important things such as appointments, so I can see, at a glance, what I have coming up.

Here is the meat of this beast — your weekly layout. Plum Paper has several versions to choose from. You can do time slots, just one big column for the day, break it into morning, noon, and night, etc. I went with what they call the Family Planner. This one gives you several little sections that you can use for whatever you like. Plum Paper gives you the option to have printed labels here, but I decided to leave all of mine blank, as I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to divide up my days yet!

At the end of your planner, you have this Special Dates section. Honestly, for me, this probably wont see much use. Any kind of special date I need to note is going to end up in the monthly/weekly spreads. Though I can see the benefit to having everything all together like this.

You also get a page to stick some contacts, and a list of holidays. Given that I have a cellphone, I probably wont ever use the contacts page, since I store all of my numbers digitally. I think most people do these days. Having a list of holidays is nice, but again, these are something that’s noted through out the planner.

Another calendar for next year, and a cardstock pocket to put some things in! I think it’s a little redundant to put another calendar in the back of the book like this, when there’s one in the front. I did order extra months, so it’s possible that’s why mine has 2016 in the front of it. The pocket is double sided. Good if you’re on the go, and still want your favorite stickers with you!

And here is the back! Like the front, it is heavy cardstock, with a frosted cover over that.

To break it down-

Pros: Good size to write in, can customize, good quality, feels sturdy, can add in your own extras with coil clips, nice layout.

Cons: Big and bulky, a bit weighty.

Now to compare the two planners…. This one is a bit hard, because they’re both sort of designed for different things. All-in-all, I have to say that the Plum Paper wins for me. I just cannot deal with the time constraints that the Passion Planner forces you into. That, and the shoddy quality of the product and the poor customer service is enough for me to advise everyone to stay far, far away from it. The Passion Planner IS more compact. Much more compact. Plum Paper is about 9×7″, and at least an inch thick, where as the Passion Planner looks to be about 5×7″ and 1/2″ thick.

The freedom you get with the Plum Paper Planner is just really hard to beat, especially when you can pick out which layout will work best for you, and option that is not available with the Passion Planner.

All views expressed here are solely my own opinion. I was not compensated in any way for this review, and have not received any benefit from writing this review.